Free Scruffy - A Diversion by Paul Gallico Page B

could attach to Ramirez for being a misanthropic, lonely, despicable little man. Nothing had ever favoured him. From the fat, unwholesome-looking child with a pasty skin, he grew into an unwholesome-looking fellow with short arms and legs, and a round head that sat almost directly upon his shoulders. He resembled a slug. He had a harsh voice and an unpleasant and repellent manner. Nobody liked him.
    Ramirez lived alone in two rooms off Calle Mendoza where he cooked his own meals on a single electric hotplate, and had no friends, although there were plenty of neighbours.
    While Gibraltarians are normally a cheerful, friendly and most hospitable people, Mr. Ramirez had been at war with the world for too many years and it showed. He didn’t like children, he didn’t like animals, and he didn’t like his neighbours.
    Now for the last few years he had been buoyed up by a secret satisfaction, the philosophy of the Nazis. It didn’t matter how you looked or what people thought of you; if the blood of the master race flowed in your veins, then you were a master man. And he followed the career of the little Austrian house painter, no beauty himself, with passionate fascination. Some of these magic corpuscles were locked into his system and made him one of them.
    It was none other than Scruffy who climaxed that catastrophic day by penetrating and exposing the second secret of Mr. Alfonso T for Treugang Ramirez.
    Scruffy’s siesta could last anywhere between two and three hours, depending upon the heat of the day and how active he had been in the morning. At five-thirty that hot afternoon he awakened, yawned, stretched, scratched himself and proceeded to confound the scientists, learned men and animal psychologists by remembering that he had had a bang-up time that morning. Simultaneously he also knew by the automatic timer that he carried in his stomach, or somewhere within his unprepossessing person, that it was an hour past his feeding time. He therefore went off at a skip and a jump to Prince Ferdinand’s Battery to find that the Gunner had already delivered their rations and that in Scruffy’s absence the pack had disposed of most of them. He took a desultory nibble at a carrot end lying on the ground, then chucked it at the tin sign warning tourists not to feed the apes, scored a ringing bull’s-eye, and was off. The need for food and the recollection of what fun he had had a short time ago decided him to return to town.
    He reached King Charles V Wall and descended at a speed that could truly be compared to that of lightning; without ever seeming to try and with a kind of gliding motion that made his great body seem to flow along the stones as though he were skimming over the surface without touching it at all.
    He arrived at the foot of the wall just as Treugang Ramirez emerged from the Admiral Nelson.
    There was still the width of the town separating the two and so each, unaware of the other, proceeded inexorably towards their encounter.
    The street where Ramirez lived was in that part of the old town close to the towering cliff of the Rock where the houses looked as though they had been built helter-skelter upon one another. It was a kind of monkey paradise since there were clothes-lines and clothes-poles criss-crossing the thoroughfare and affixed to one of the cornices of a building was a traffic sign, surmounted by a triangle.
    Arrived there, Scruffy found that this triangle suited him admirably. He wedged his thick body into it. There is no doubt that any picture looks better framed and Scruffy was no exception. It gave him a kind of patriarchal elder-statesman look, and he sat there letting himself be admired.
    It was not usual for an ape to appear so far to the north of the town and thus Scruffy was able to assemble more of a crowd of the curious than he usually attracted. Men, women and children came out from their stone and stucco dwellings and stood looking up at Scruffy.
    Ramirez now came striding into this